Cent OS migration

[Jay Ashworth]

----- Original Message -----
> From: scooter6 at gmail.com

> 1. Is there a migration tool that will take all my existing users and
> 'import' them as users on CentOS?

Probably not.

> 3. Is setting up printers/drivers pretty simple on CentOS?

Nowadays, yeah.  

> 4. What RAID configuration is best for speed and failover, etc? We are
> a busy place and can't afford downtime.

My personal preference is RAID 1 mirroring; it's unlikely that a business
app is going to need enough throughput that you'd need to stripe for
performance, and disks are cheap.  Hot-Swap SCSI U320s or SAS, though; 
don't play around with SATA if you're serious.  Those SCSI drives cost
six times as much per byte *for a reason* (take my 20 years of experience
for whatever you like. :-)

> 5. Can you run a backup to a USB drive using CentOS? If not, what
> backup solution is best?

Tape.  If it's not tape, it's not a backup.  LTO; whatever size you need.

Full backup every night, alternating Fridays, and take one off-prem every
week.  Full backup to a separate tape at EOQ, and before and after every
major accounting close, keep both EOY tapes for at least 5 years.  Plan to
need at least 2 boxes of 10 tapes.  Label every tape before you put it in.

Use BackupEdge.  You're welcome, Tom.

> 6. Does CentOS support dual processors?

Current kernels will support up to... 32 cores?  No reason your new 
box shouldn't be at least a dual-processor Core2Duo or newer, i5, i7.

There's no cost-effective reason for a business server these days to have
*less* than 4 cores.

> 7. Is there a specific version of CentOS that seems to be more stable,
> etc than others?

CentOS is stable.  My Zimbra mail server ran on it for... 2 years?  Rebooted 
only when I needed to.

> 8. Other than exchanging our current licensing with filePro, is there
> anything else that needs to be done to the filePro files so they run
> on CentOS?

My understanding was that they *wouldn't* do OS swaps on licenses; did
that change, finally?  I have to play several rounds of musical chairs when
we did OS swaps; luckily, we had enough customers to pull it off.

> 9. For my many scripts that I have running, is there a big directory
> hierarchy difference on CentOS vs. SCO?
> i.e. are user profiles still in /usr directory? Does the PATH variable
> need to change on my scripts? i.e. /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /etc, etc

You should want to put all your local scripts in /usr/local/bin, I would
think.  FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) is the thing you're looking for.

User homes are in /home these days.

I hope you're not using any descendent of the Fourgen menu programs (Menu
Master, MenuMaestro, MenuEze).  They won't run on Linux, and iBCS/LinuxABI
have never been forward ported to 2.6 kernels reliably, so you'll be Right
Out.

Cheers,
-- jra